THE BRASS BED

Author: Jennifer Stevenson ISBN: 9780345486684 4/2008 PARANORMAL Publisher: BALLANTINE

THE CURSE: Satisfy one hundred women or be trapped in a brass bed forever. Lord Randall was a lousy lover in 1811, so his magician-mistress turned him into a sex demon. Lucky for him, his bed fell into Clay's hands. THE CON: Sex therapy for women on an antique brass "treatment bed". Clay has the perfect scam going, until that pesky, foxy fraud investigator Jewel comes sniffing around. Lucky for him, she has a soft spot for hunky con men. THE CHOICE: Sex demon or sex fraudster? Jewel is Randy's hundredth woman. Now he says he's her personal sex slave, and her case against the con artist is dissolving in a hail of hormones. Lucky for her, she's a tough cop with a lusty libido.

RRAH's THOUGHTS AND PONDERINGS:

I'm finding it extremely difficult to write a review for this book, mainly because I had no idea what was going on throughout the story. The blurb says there's a man-turned-sex demon trapped in a brass bed until he has pleasured 100 women who have slept in the bed.

That's true. 

The blurb says Jewel Heiss is a fraud investigator who ends up being the 100th woman.

That's true, too.

But though it seems like that should be the jumping off point for the story, Jewel doesn't meet Randy, the sex demon, until a third of the way into the book. That calls for a significant investment in the book before we even get to meet the hero, which may be more than some readers are willing to expend. The first third of the book is spent setting up the meeting between Jewel and Randy.

Jewel's boss has sent her to investigate what his wife has been spending thousands of dollars on. He suspects the wife has a taken a lover, but he wants to be sure. The boss's wife (who is Jewel's best friend) has been having sex therapy that she claims has changed her life and is well worth every penny spent. She persuades Jewel to schedule a session with the therapist who is the keeper of the bed Randy is trapped in. Even though Jewel has serious doubts about the legality of this sex therapist business, she is persuaded to try out the bed. There she has wild, seriously crazy sex with all manner of the male species. She eventually meets Randy, and together they try to figure out whether Randy's curse is broken because she is the 100th woman he pleasured, or if his curse is broken because he's given women pleasure 100 times. There's a subtle difference there—if you catch it.

Overall, I found THE BRASS BED to be over-the-top ridiculous, and incredible, even allowing for the fact that it is a paranormal.  The only part of the book I liked were the cigarette-smoking pigeons; everything else I hated. I didn't like Jewel, I didn't like Randy and I didn't like any of the other characters in the book. I couldn't stand the dialogue—most things were written normally, but every so often the author would throw in a word or two written in some kind of pseudo-Brooklyn dialect, which I found distracting. Lastly, I found the sex to be anything but sexy—more often than not I was "squicked" out by the sex scenes, not only because they were hard to follow, but there always seemed to be a bird or some animal involved. I'm sorry I wasted as much time as I did trying to make sense of this book and I have no intention of picking up anything else written by this author. For those who are intrigued, though, Stevenson has back-to-back releases: THE BRASS BED in May; THE VELVET CHAIR in June; and THE BEARSKIN RUG in July.

Jilian Vallade